Dmitriy I. Polyvyannyy* he Balkan Minorities: Divided States, Peoples and Societies I. Introduction Contemporary Balkan ethnic politics, still turbulent and stirred up, but no longer bloody as they were in the 1990s, now attract the attention mainly of scholars specializing in legal and political studies. At least at irst sight, the potential for history to explain contemporary Balkan events looks exhausted (if not compromised) by the attempt to construct models of diferent levels of plausibility based upon a simplistic conception of the present being merely a continuation of the past, of a deeply rooted tradition of con- lict, by all the participants as well as by the observers of the settled, partially settled and still ongoing Balkan ethnic conlicts.  When now a historian tries to intervene into the traditionally taboo ields of current political changes and uncompleted developments, the main objection he or she meets concerns the impossibility of making any practical conclusions on the basis of historical observations. Any historical argument looks use- less and improper when compared with solid political or juridical research dealing with the contemporary situation and the perspectives of the southeastern periphery of the enlarging European Union. he opinion expressed above is neither a lamentation nor an appeal for justice. Historical discourse as the main source for the construction of modern national identi- ties has evidently demonstrated both its numerous weak points as well as its practical signiicance to research. Often papering over alternative explanations, it usually intends to represent contemporary developments as being inevitably predicted by ‘eternal’, mostly geopolitical, realities, by some ‘objective’ long-time process, by ‘age-old’ contra- dictions or by ‘traditional’ rivalry and ‘inherited’ hatred, etc. Moreover, some historians try to forecast (if not to prophesy) rather than carefully collecting, classifying and inter- * Ivanovo State University, Russian Federation. 1 See Sergey Romanenko. Istoriya i istoriki v mezhetnicheskix konliktax v konce XX veka. Pochemu vozrozhdaetsya soznanie “zakrytogo obshchestva”? (Open Society Institute, Moscow, 1997). European Yearbook of Minority Issues Vol 5, 2005/6, ISBN 978 9004 xxxxx x, 181-193. © 2007 Koninklijke Brill NV. Printed in the Netherlands.